A research project at the Helmholtz Institute for One Health (HIOH), a site of the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI), has been awarded the Undine Award 2025 in the “Habitat” category. The prize was presented in Stuttgart. In the award-winning project, a research team led by Prof. Katharina Schaufler is investigating antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in the surface water of the Greifswald Bodden. Targeted science communication is also an important part of the project in order to raise public awareness of the issue. Schaufler heads the department “Epidemiology and Ecology of Antimicrobial Resistance” at the HIOH and receives prize money of 20,000 euros and an image film with the Undine Award.

Researchers at the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI) have contributed to a study by the Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf (UKE) that has uncovered a new mechanism of neuron damage in the autoimmune disease multiple sclerosis (MS). Until now, it was unclear how inflammation in MS reduces protein degradation and leads to their harmful accumulation in neurons. A combination of new molecular biological, biochemical, and genetic methods enabled the international research team to identify a previously unknown mechanism of impaired protein degradation in inflamed neurons and its key regulator, the immunoproteasome.

Despite being genetically identical, bacteria can vary considerably in shape and size. Whether these variations affect bacterial function has remained an open question. Researchers at the Helmholtz Institute for RNA-based Infection Research (HIRI) and the Chair of Microbiology of the Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg (JMU) have now characterized the functional differences between various forms of the gut bacterium Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron. They demonstrated a link between cell type and metabolic function. These findings offer deeper insights into microbial gut diversity and pave the way for new possibilities in microbiome-based therapies. The study was recently published in the journal Cell Reports.